How to setup apache beginner help

Hi, I’m beginner with Linux but an IT pro on Windows!
I plan to run Drupal on my local machine but need help how to configure Apache and PHP if necessary? I’m using 10.3 and installed (LAMP) Apache/2.2.4, PHP/5.2.6. Apache and PHP default installation are running correctly.

1)How and where to modified apache directives to “map” to my Drupal directory?
I’m confuse because some instructions said I have to modified the httpd.conf file, some I have to add virtual host based on vhost.template some to modified default-server.conf etc.

2)What is the key different in using a sub directory of /username/public_html/ with /srv/www/htdocs/?

3)When apache will be setup correctly do I’ll have to modified php settings?

Thanks

I’m not an expert either but here are some of the things I needed to do to be able to use Drupal on my local machine.

I am using OpenSuse 11, but it should not matter. After I installed LAMP I also installed phpMyAdmin using Yast. When browsing to http://localhost/phpMyAdmin/ I created a database and user for my Drupal site. I also enabled the mod_rewrite module using Yast - HTTP server configuration.

Next I extracted the Drupal archive to my public_html folder and I was able to access the Drupal site using http://localhost/~jensen/drupal/. (jensen is my user name.) The only extra thing I had to do was to make a modification to the .htaccess file to have URL rewrites working. The .htaccess file contains the following section:

  # Modify the RewriteBase if you are using Drupal in a subdirectory or in a
  # VirtualDocumentRoot and the rewrite rules are not working properly.
  # For example if your site is at http://example.com/drupal uncomment and
  # modify the following line:
  # RewriteBase /drupal

I had to change that to:

  # Modify the RewriteBase if you are using Drupal in a subdirectory or in a
  # VirtualDocumentRoot and the rewrite rules are not working properly.
  # For example if your site is at http://example.com/drupal uncomment and
  # modify the following line:
  RewriteBase /~jensen/drupal/

Where of course /~jensen/drupal/ is your path.